Scooter Libby’s Unpardonable Fundraiser

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Scooter Libby’s legal defense fund has yet to start calling for a presidential pardon. But while it rejiggers its strategy, let’s get reacquainted with the group’s head, Republican donor and former ambassador Mel Sembler. As John Gorenfeld wrote in our May 2006 issue:

…Sembler knows a thing or two about the humiliations of involuntary confinement. For 17 years, he directed Straight, Inc., a substance-abuse rehab and behavior modification program that treated American teens like terrorism suspects. Sembler’s official bio boasts that the “remarkable program” — where children had to flap their arms like chickens or else face shaming as “sluts” and homosexuals — treated 12,000 kids. President George H.W. Bush hailed it as one of his “thousand points of light.” But in the early ’90s, amid state investigations and suits filed by clients claiming physical and mental abuse, his clinics were dismantled. Hundreds of Straight alums now claim they were scarred for life, among them Samantha Monroe, who was enrolled in 1980 at age 12 and claims she was starved, raped, and confined in a closet.

Once a point of light, always a point of light, I guess.

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